Abstract
The subjective sense of certainty, or confidence, in ambiguous sensory cues can alter the interpretation of reward feedback and facilitate learning. We trained rats to report the orientation of ambiguous visual stimuli according to a spatial stimulus-response rule that must be learned. Following choice, rats could wait a self-timed delay for reward or initiate a new trial. Waiting times increase with discrimination accuracy, demonstrating that this measure can be used as a proxy for confidence. Chemogenetic silencing of BLA shortens waiting times overall whereas ACC inhibition renders waiting times insensitive to confidence-modulating attributes of visual stimuli, suggesting contribution of ACC but not BLA to confidence computations. Subsequent reversal learning is enhanced by confidence. Both ACC and BLA inhibition block this enhancement but via differential adjustments in learning strategies and consistent use of learned rules. Altogether, we demonstrate dissociable roles for ACC and BLA in transmitting confidence and learning under uncertainty.
Highlights
The subjective sense of certainty, or confidence, in ambiguous sensory cues can alter the interpretation of reward feedback and facilitate learning
anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and basolateral amygdala (BLA) inhibition failed to affect task engagement and perceptual processing speed as evidenced by the lack of change in the distributions of reaction time (GLM: p = 10−16; βdrug = −0.01, p = 0.81; βregion = 0.001, p = 0.98; Fig. 4f), and these responses did not differ by trial type. This pattern held for each value of contrast separately (Supplementary Fig. 3d–f). Together these findings demonstrate that the observed effects of ACC and BLA inhibition on waiting times were not attributable to changes in decisionmaking processes related to visual discrimination
Following ACC inhibition, meta—d′/d′, was significantly lower than vehicle (one-way ANOVA: diff(mean) = −0.2366, p = 1.6438 × 10−6; Fig. 5c). These results demonstrate that confidence report following ACC inhibition becomes less sensitive to the accuracy of the trial and further suggest that ACC is involved in the computation of confidence. Consistent with these results, we found that the trialby-trial correlation between waiting time and reaction time was weaker following ACC inhibition compared to BLA inhibition (Supplementary Fig. 10 and Supplementary Note 6)
Summary
The subjective sense of certainty, or confidence, in ambiguous sensory cues can alter the interpretation of reward feedback and facilitate learning. This is not the case in naturalistic settings in which sensory cues or stimuli are ambiguous and the perception of or prediction about the state of the world is uncertain In such situations, stimulus detection or discrimination are frequently accompanied by a sense of certainty, or confidence, in choice[1,2]. Following action selection using a touchscreen, rats expressed their confidence by time-wagering: they could wait for a variable amount of time before they could receive a possible reward or initiate a new trial[11]. Subsequent reversal learning is enhanced by confidence and both ACC and BLA inhibition block this enhancement These effects happen through differential adjustments in response to reward feedback and in consistent use of learned rules on successive trials. Our results demonstrate dissociable contributions of ACC and BLA to computations of confidence and learning under uncertainty
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